Below is the complete list of Matt Dinniman books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Dominion of Blades Books
Publication Order of Dungeon Crawler Carl Books
Publication Order of Dungeon Crawler Carl Graphic Novels Books
Publication Order of The Shivered Sky Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Collections Books
About Matt Dinniman
Matt Dinniman is an American writer, artist, and musician best known for Dungeon Crawler Carl, the darkly comic LitRPG series that grew from an independently published web serial into a major fantasy and science-fiction success. Based in Gig Harbor, Washington, Dinniman has spent much of his career moving between fantasy, horror, science fiction, and game-based storytelling, often combining absurd humor with violence, survival, and characters trapped inside systems designed to exploit them.
Dinniman was writing speculative fiction long before Dungeon Crawler Carl. His first published novel, The Shivered Sky, appeared in 2003 and was later reworked and republished as a three-part fantasy-horror saga beginning with Every Grain of Sand. Set in a ruined afterlife where demons have largely defeated the forces of Heaven, the work already showed his interest in grotesque worlds, apocalyptic stakes, and ordinary people forced to survive inside systems much larger than themselves. Before writing full time, Dinniman also worked as an artist, including producing animal artwork and attending pet shows, and he continues to play bass in a band.
His move into LitRPG became clearer with Dominion of Blades in 2017. The novel traps its characters inside what had once been a hugely popular immersive role-playing game, combining traditional fantasy adventure with levels, abilities, game rules, and questions about what happens when a virtual environment becomes horrifyingly real. The Hobgoblin Riot continued the series, while a planned third installment remains unfinished. Dinniman pushed the darker possibilities of game-based fiction much further in Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon, a 2019 LitRPG horror novel built around a full-immersion game where pain, bodily damage, and repeated resurrection are central to the nightmare.
His breakthrough came with Dungeon Crawler Carl. Dinniman began publishing the story on Royal Road in 2020 before self-publishing the first novel later that year. The premise sends Coast Guard veteran Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning cat, Princess Donut, into an eighteen-level dungeon created after an alien takeover destroys most of Earth’s infrastructure. Their survival is broadcast across the galaxy as entertainment, turning an RPG-style dungeon crawl into a grotesque reality show.
The series became especially notable for balancing game mechanics with character development. Levels, classes, achievements, loot, quests, and increasingly elaborate rules provide the LitRPG structure, but Dinniman uses the dungeon to explore exploitation, corporate control, propaganda, trauma, rebellion, and the moral cost of surviving while an audience treats suffering as entertainment. Carl and Donut’s relationship supplies much of the emotional center, while Dinniman’s humor frequently operates beside genuinely bleak material rather than replacing it.
Audiobooks narrated by Jeff Hays became an important part of the series’ popularity, and Dinniman has said that Hays’s performances now influence how he hears characters while writing. Ace later acquired print rights and began issuing new hardcover editions, helping move the series from independent publishing into mainstream bookstores. By 2026, Dungeon Crawler Carl had reached eight novels with A Parade of Horribles, an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.
Dinniman has continued writing outside Carl’s world. His 2026 standalone Operation Bounce House uses another gamified form of violence, this time imagining colonists attacked by machines remotely controlled by paying gamers on Earth. The recurring concern is recognizable: technology converts real suffering into entertainment for people safely removed from its consequences.
That mixture of comedy, horror, gaming culture, and social satire has become Dinniman’s clearest signature. His career also represents an unusually successful path from web serialization and self-publishing to traditional publishing and screen adaptation; in 2026, Peacock officially ordered a live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl series, with Dinniman serving as an executive producer alongside writer Chris Yost and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door.